Jahans and morality
A moral man. A true humanitarian. Our Prophet. Alexander Gordon Jahan's views on morality. Quotes "(...) People are to me wondrous and scary. I am serious. I can't be any other way. I have a morality, if you're immoral I don't like that. A joke is not funny if it is immoral. How could it be? You've just been a dick to someone, that is not cool. No I don't care that they're your friend and you're being funny, you're being a dick stop it. (...)" -Aspergers Syndrome and Me (04-24-2015) "(...) The reason I still live is my morality. It's all I have left and the one thing telling me "Don't be ridiculous of course you deserve to live and be happy" So naturally every member of my family and the employment advisor I was sent to has suggested that my morality is a massive problem that needs to go away. Just let go of the one thing that matters and is keeping you from commiting suicide, that's the answer to all your problems. (...)" -To be or not to be. (05-02-2015) "(...) I don't know if I'm a good man but there are two kinds of morality and no I'm not talking about classical or utilitarian morality. There is instinctual morality, the implicit understanding of what is right and wrong and then there is imposed morality, this is the kind so many heroes have in fiction. They feel the urge for revenge, they feel the urge to destroy but they hold back because their imposed morality won't let them. I am used to imposing my morality on my anger, now it seems I must impose my morality on my lust to ensure things that are safe on paper stay safely on paper. This won't be difficult." -Am I A Good Man? NSFW (09-13-2015) "(...) Make no mistake in school my morality was a restraint. That was when the fire burned brightest, when I felt almost overwhelming rage on a near daily basis and my morality prevented me from even attempting to harm others, despite how much I wanted revenge. I don't need the restraints any more. I don't need morality an imposed code. (...)" -My Darkness (09-29-2015) "(...)I am not a nice man, then again I hate myself so I would say that wouldn't I? I have a hybrid of classical and utilitarian morality, designed to be the most moral in all situations and I'm a feminist and an environmentalist and a left wing republican regulated capitalist. I should be on paper super nice. Except being smart. compassionate and bound by a self imposed code of right and wrong does not preclude the possibility of being a massive douche. Lets jump in near the deep end shall we? I like power. I like to have power over people. For someone who has always been so powerless and has suffered to the point of having a breakdown because others had power over him, to feel in control feels really nice and I'm savvy enough to know that if I don't watch that then hooo boy! '' ''Except there's more than that. Do you know why I am so anti-revenge? Why the idea fills me with disgust? Because when I was at school the headteacher thought I would pull a Columbine, literally called me aside one day and had police officers waiting to check my bag because I used a turn of phrase that someone trying to beat the crap out of me took literally. This was years before I had my breakdown by the way. '' ''Revenge is disgusting to me. not just because it is violence creating more violence, but because it seems such a satisfying goal. They hurt me so I'll hurt them back. That almost seems fair until you realise that I was bullied by most of the school on a fairly regular basis so according to utilitarian morality I really should just suck it up and it is honestly so time consuming on the internet. I mean I'm a busy guy, I have a lot of angsting to do, I don't have time to respond to all the people asking me to kill myself.(...)" -Confronting the Darkness of the Self (12-03-2015) "Hybrid Morality is a fusion of Utilitarian Morality and Classical Morality. The reason I use a fusion is that they both have problems. '' ''The perfect example of Classical Morality being a bad thing is typified by Batman at the Joker. The Joker is not ambiguous. He is not shades of grey. He does not get into an enemy mine situation with the Batman. He is just fucking nuts and sadistic and Arkham is a cardboard prison but killing is wrong so time after time the Joker gets out and people suffer and die. I’d say that at least by the seventh escape and massacre you really should just fucking kill the bastard. Batman is already breaking the law massively and being a violent sadist, just kill him already. The perfect example of Utilitarian Morality being a bad thing is the darkness within the Doctor. This is a man who can weaponise charisma, empathy and intelligence to make daleks commit suicide. This is a very dangerous man capable of manipulating people with a very cold pragmatism because the ends really do mathematically justify the means. I can absolutely understand why the Valeyard would try to steal the remaining regenerations of his sixth incarnation because there are a lot of wasted lives there and ultimately a weapon as useful and powerful as the Doctor is empirically, mathematically, worth Cass and Rose and Wilf. Except the day the Doctor does that, the day he says “My life is more important than yours so I’m going to let you die so I can live” is the day he stops being a hero and starts being a monster. So how is Hybrid Morality calculated well obviously every situation is different but basically Classical Morality is used as a kind of modifier to the Utilitarian morality calculation." -Figuring stuff out (12-07-2015) (...) I also have a very complex thing called Hybrid Morality that does in fact say that sometimes violence is the moral thing to do but revenge is never going to play into that. You see I believe it is moral to act in a manner that harms if you can prevent the majority being harmed but that it is always better to try and do so with the least harm possible. How the fuck can you calmly perform the dreadful algebra necessary to save lives when you dearly want someone to suffer? This is why I dislike Batman as a character actually. '' ''So lets talk about the justice shall we? Not the Justice System we have in Britain or America but what it should be ideally as far as I am concerned. Fair, correct, moral and effective. Fair means everyone involved in the case should get a chance to state their case. There there should be someone arguing for defence and someone arguing for prosecution. '' ''Moral means that the sentencing should deliver the greatest good to the greatest majority and that the morality of the situation should be considered. (...) ''-Rehabilitation not revenge (02-02-2016) '' "There is part of me that thinks I should die for my sins, and for my being a burden on my family, especially if the trolls are scaring them. Yet my own morality stops me. My morality would force me to try and offer redemption to Hitler and Stalin and Thatcher, so how the fuck can I justify the death sentence for myself?" -Confession Time (08-28-2016) "Morality isn't some virtuous mainstream lie I need to be enlightened about the sham of. Morality is the cage I trap myself in to protect the very fucking arseholes who sneer about how it makes me weak. (...) If I didn't have my morality, the very morality I am ridiculed for having by the alt-right and the trolls, then they would suffer." I mean maybe it's just bluster and bravado convincing myself I'm terrible because of the fiction I write but my morality absolutely protects the alt-right just as much as it makes me fundamentally opposed to them. I am someone who, because of my morality and the wisdom of it, seeks peace and understanding for all, even if I should dearly like the fuckers to rue the day. -Feels (09-01-2016) "You see my morality isn't some scientifically derived truth to be reasoned and debated and questioned. It is a fucking immutable constant. Entirely subjective of course, entirely my own experiences and you may disagree but, and this is the important point, I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU THINK OF MY MORALITY. My morality is a constant that will not let me harm or be hurtful and neither will it let me die because under no other circumstances would any of what I'm experiencing be worth the death of another." -To The Pain (09-04-2016) "I have been trapped for a long time by a straight jacket of morality. By this almost christian idea of the heavenly feminists and demonic right wing, by the idea that I am a monster unworthy of heaven but desperately trying to break into it." -The End Is Nigh (10-20-2016) "I am not beholden to morality because I am some snotty nosed elite liberal. (Well okay I am snotty nosed but that’s rhinitis and if you believe in identity politics...) I do not think I am better than you or holier than thou because I refuse to beat the fuck out of those who despise me. I think I am worse than you because I long realised the need for these rules. Morality is a cage that protects me by protecting society. I know people or at least I have the capacity to greatly understand them." -Bloggage "220117" (01-22-2017) ''Morality First'' (06-12-2015)' MORALITY FIRST By Alexander Gordon Jahans This is not an article I wanted to write. This is not an article I thought I had to write. This is an article that is inconvenient to write. This is an article that will have negative ramifications in my very near future and throughout my life until the day I die, possibly beyond my grave. When I was a kid my parents worked 9-5 and beyond doing jobs in the national interest and when the got home they were too fractious and shattered to really spend much time with me so instead they gave me what I craved, relative freedom and independence and the latest gadgets. My first games console was a game boy colour that was purple and transparent. They would buy me each successive generation of the gameboy and Nintendo's home consoles from the N64 upwards. I loved them for it and that generosity no doubt allowed me to become addicted to letsplays today but my childhood was not all Lylat Wars and homework. I got bullied a lot as a kid. And bullying creates a kind of feedback loop after a while because the weirder you are the more you're bullied and the more you're bullied, the more your reputation drops and the more you find every excuse not to socialise and so you're even weirder, So I discovered Star Trek and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I was so hated and so neurotic because of that hatred and so desperate for distraction that I became a geek and now suddenly that makes me cool. But I'm not a geek. Not really. I am the person who became a geek by accident. I didn't have scifi handed down to me and I didn't find it in a dusty old attic like some forgotten and mystical relic. I ran to it to get away from the bullies and now I'm old enough to vote I find the bullies are running the country. That's what it comes down to in the end. The last time I felt such a strong urge to commit suicide and was so dependent on others to help get me out of a difficult place was when I was a kid running from bullies. In many ways things are worse now, which would explain why I've been feeling worse than last time but this isn't about my problems, this is about the country and about something I learned that the world didn't. When I was a kid I was a pacifist, straight up would not hurt another living being, even with the anger issues I had as a kid, even with the need to defend myself very real. I refused to be the very thing that was making my life hell. And now I've gotten in debt getting a degree and finding voluntary work is hard, let alone a job and the government is fucking over the economy so it can fuck over the poor and all the while racists scream about immigrants being the problem so I try not to claim benefits unless I really need them. Things were shitty then and they are shitty now. The difference of course is that it's not just me being bullied. People are dying under the illegitimate rule of the Conservative party. People are dying and when I research this stuff, when I debate British politics on forums and make political videos on youtube my sister warns me away and my father fears that criticising the system means I will never get a job. They fear I will get arrested. Well I respectfully feel like the appropriate response to those arguments and concerns is that I don't give a shit because morality is more important. This is such a bizarrely controversial thing to say, that morality is more important than getting a job, than family or friends, than my own life. David Cameron and George Osborne are bullies and I don't like bullies. Except it's more than that isn't it? I realised at school that the system was trapping me in a system of suffering so one day I just walked out and never went back. Well except for the gcses but that was a clusterfuck. My point is that I realised the cage was in my own head. I felt like a prisoner because to me the school rules and the law and morality were one and the same. When I was freed from the prison in my own head I realised that there was a higher morality, the morality of the greatest good for the greatest majority. At the time it meant ending my own suffering but now it means ending the suffering of all. David Cameron's party is killing people, he is rescinding our human rights and giving corporations the ability to sue governments and now George Osborne wants to enforce the economy screwing austerity on successive governments. How is it wrong to criticise that? Revolution is indeed near but I won't lead it, I want David Cameron to wake up to the mood of the nation and help defuse the metric fuck ton of napalm waiting to go off. The public mood at the moment is like a tinder box and he is carelessly having a fag. I may be a moral pragmatist but I am so far an actual pacifist and I would rather like to prevent the loss of life that will occur if and when David Cameron provokes violent revolution. How long do you think the public will sit quietly by as the government that was voted for by less than a quarter of the population of Great Britain and Northern Ireland continues to fuck them over for the benefit of the 1%? The rich know it's coming and they are preparing for it like the goddamn zombie apocalypse but still David Cameron gives a hearty fuck you to the rapidly growing poor of Britain. At least 40 people so far have commited suicide because of benefit sanctions, how long before these people, often mentally ill, decide to attack the government instead of commiting suicide? I mean he's cut their benefits, cut funding to mental health and screwed up the economy so you're going to have a lot of very pissed off, mentally unwell people with a lot of time on their hands. Tick. Tock. Time's running out. There is one hell of a cluster fuck approaching and I consider myself to be in the rather privileged position of not caring about my life at the moment so I don't care about the threats that are made, I will champion the cause of morality no matter what the pressure that is applied to me. People are dying because of the bullingdon bullies so I will not stop writing about politics and making political videos. I hope democracy can prevail before the revolution happens but I think that unless serious and unlikely changes are made, such as instituting proportional representation the shit will hit the fan. My name is Alex Jahans, I hate bullies and I hate violence, I hope you do too. Tick... ''Morality, Faith and the Will to Live (09-23-2015) MORALITY, FAITH AND THE WILL TO LIVE By Alexander Gordon Jahans Question: Why do the moral write and consume fiction about immoral things? Bloggage: So the internet goes down, an arsehole invades my privacy to apologise for being an arsehole, I found out my dad’s latest attempt at manipulation and control is trying to blame my testosterone for the one time I went on the offensive and tried to push him out of the house, then I find out I have low cortisol and need to take pills at precise times every day that are anathema to my sleeping pattern or I will die, my mum all but makes clear that she still sees me as a child and then I finish listening to Perdido Street Station and find out that cuddly badass Geruda Yag is a rapist. Yet... I feel good. You see there is a tension at my heart that rarely gets acknowledged because compared to everything else it seems ridiculous. I went to a Church of England School as an atheist and I have been lapsing towards christianity for a while now but the lapsing never gets very far because science, man, it just wrecks christianity asunder. Hypothesis: Imagine there was a dichotomy at your core? You are a moral person but you are flawed, you are disgusted by yourself? You might try to write as a warning, as therapy, to understand yourself, to vent safely? You might read about the immoral so as to better understand immorality through the prism of morality and so better understand your morality? How do you believe in yourself when you hate yourself and want to die? This is why god is appealing, why religion is appealing, to me. I don’t have to believe in myself because Mr Magic Hero Man will save the day. I don’t have to worry about watching myself because a divine being is watching and judging for me. I don’t need to worry about the shit I’m enduring because the divine has a plan and one day everything will be fine in the after life. It also removes the sweet seductive temptation of atheist oblivion if you know you’ll have an eternity of wondering “What if...?” This is something that crops up in my writing. It is deliberate and explicit to a certain extent that the Farsh-nuke, the Bam-Kursh and Gfaxxy Quluwmcy are atheist interpretations of Jesus, Lucifer and Gaia, albeit seen through that great vision of atheist christianty, Doctor Who (The Doctor, the Master and the Brigadier). When you are lost and alone with so little to live for and fucked up genetics the Farsh-nuke or the Bam-Kursh turning up to seduce you and whisk you away to a different life, obeying their higher power is tempting. An idea that recurra because it is a longed for fantasy. Answer: Because the more you come to understand morality, the more you understand that it is a kind of faith. I am happy because I am not a christian blindly following a set of handed down rules and I am not an automaton making calculations to determine utilitarian morality. I am not lawful good and I am not chaotic neutral. I am chaotic good. I am anti-authoritarian and fundamentally self motivated but I morally driven. My morality is not gospel and it is not anyone’s canon, I will not be lectured and pedanted by people who don’t know the circumstances. My morality is my faith. My morality is my reason to live. My will to live. I am not an important man by any stretch of the imagination but my causes are and they deserve all the help they can get. My life is not important and I will welcome death when it inevitably comes but I will avoid it for as long as I can so I can continue the good fight. I am not a good man and by my own standards I am a fairly despicable individual but it is not the colour of the soul that matters, it is how you use it to affect the world. I will be honest in the low motivations behind writing what I do but I can and like to think I do use this to further my aims. I am still a novice at writing and have much to learn but at least when I try to give my wank fodder a fig leaf of justification to let myself sleep at night there is a modicum of depth and lore and allegory and metaphor behind it beyond “It’s okay that she’s naked because she breathes through her skin” So what do I stand for? What are my, to be awfully grandiose, commandments? 1. That no one should suffer when the resources are available to ease the suffering. 2. That choice and consent is of paramount importance. 3. That no one’s skin or genitals should stop them from living the life they want to lead. 4. That suffering should be eliminated wherever possible. 5. Wherever possible, find a way to have your cake and eat it to. These are the values that determine my morality and determine my faith. This is how I judge the world and want myself judged. I find it interesting to note that my criticvs have a point. My self loathing does wash onto fellow men who want to live good moral lives that happen to reinforce a system that discourages others from living theirs but I suppose that’s the point. If you are going to enjoy something that under the current system would help hold people back and oppress them then you have to make clear that you are not defending the system, either by criticising it or nakedly showing the exploitative nature for what it is. Either be honest that you are part of the oppressive system or criticise it, don’t defend the system with “It’s okay because she breathes through her skin” Yag denied consent in a horrific way but in all other respects Yag is a nice guy who put his life on the line for the service of good and I am glad that he found apotheosis and rebirth. My crimes are nowhere near the same scale but they have weighed on my heart. How can I, as a moral man, write this stuff? Because that is who I am for good or ill and with it I can stay alive and fight the good fight. My dad is a manipulative cunt but this is not new. I may have to take pills every day for the rest of my life but look at it this way the man who has fought against habits all his life, now has one and it is not so bad as I first thought plus there may yet be a third way to stay alive and not worry about my sleeping pattern. Trolls will be trolls. The internet is, by the time you read this, back up. I am reborn an anti-theist with faith in my morality and I am happy right here, more or less. ''A Reminder Of How Utilitarian Morality Works (06-06-2016)'' A REMINDER OF HOW UTILITARIAN MORALITY WORKS By Alexander Gordon Jahans Utilitarian Morality is in its fundamental understanding the Greatest Good For The Greatest Majority. Under Utilitarian Morality all sapient lives are fundamentally the same. What matters is the actions those lives perform. In an evenly split decision pick the action that is more convenient/liable to make you happiest, sure. In any other situation Utilitarian Morality is mathematical. Taking a purely hypothetical example plucked from thin air, lets say a group has a certain amount of stored fund raising potential. It could use that limited potential to feed say 30 homeless people for a month, or it could fund a transperson to get full SRS. (Please note I am pulling this out of my arse, this probably isn't an accurate price comparison.) Under that simple scenario the more moral action is to feed the homeless. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one. Except while all sapient lives are fundamentally the same they do not have the same capacity for affecting the world. A popular journalist who acts as an advocate/representative of the transgender community acts as a kind of force multiplier for moral good. Their potential to create greater good makes their life worth more than another trans individual or so many homeless people. Thus under utilitarian morality making them less likely to die/better able to deal with stress is the more moral thing to do This is a positive example so lets look at a negative example. Again pulled entirely from the air. Lets say there is a politician, a reviled politician backed by an unpopular demographic that is in the minority within a country. Denying that politician a platform means a minority do not get their views vindicated in mainstream media and lets their cause wither and die without unduly affecting the majority. That would be the more moral action. Except under this political system there is some kind of hybrid morality dictating that the unpopular politician should get a platform and now they could get into power. If they get into power they and their supporters will act as a powerful negative modifier, drastically reducing the quality of life for many, if not outright causing the deaths of many. In that situation should you remove their platform or even take them out? In this entirely hypothetical example this unpopular politician stands to unleash mass torment upon a population surely one life is worth the lives of so many others? No. If you try to silence the unpopular politician at such a late juncture but before their ideas can truly be tested all you are doing is fostering negativity and encouraging the problematic minority to keep supporting the silenced politician as they can now believe they were cheated from victory. If you do not believe this would be problematic then you forget one of the key reasons Hitler gained so much support, the belief that the first world war of all things was snatched unfairly from them because not enough of their brave men were killed to make the defeat feel final enough. If you silence the hypothetical unpopular politician or are stupid enough to kill him then you will be unleashing an angry dangerous demographic who now feel they were unfairly robbed of an even chance. Thus this is not a moral option. So assuming the unpopular politician and their problematic minority of supporters are not going to be silenced due to the morality of the situation, what do you do about the larger counter minority that is now beying for blood? These are the people the unpopular politician is going to cause to suffer or die. Surely they have a moral right to defend themselves? No. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Their cause may be more nobly motivated but if they rouse the unpopular politician's supporters into violence there will be death and suffering that more than outweighs the death and suffering the unpopular politician could cause. It is incredibly easy to look at an agitator for harm and judge them as worthy as dying then look at an someone trying to defend themselves and say they have a right to but utilitarian morality is about the larger picture. If good people must be sacrificed to bad to prevent a larger amount of deaths then that is the only true moral action under utilitarian morality. This is a cold conclusion and I will never begrudge someone trying to defend themselves or their loved ones from suffering but if they advocate violence when doing so would unleash great devastation then they are amoral fools. Videos about morality Category:Esoteric Jahanism